Michael G

Take control of your browsing with Firefox’s privacy and security features

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Take control of your browsing with Firefox’s privacy and security features

Most browsers know way too much about you – your latest obsession, your shopping cart, even your weekend plans. Firefox? It’s built to power your browsing, nothing more. Here’s a breakdown of the Firefox features that keep you private and secure online. Total Cookie Protection Instead of letting cookies follow you across different websites and […]

The post Take control of your browsing with Firefox’s privacy and security features appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

health @ Savannah: Time to take back the Internet

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It’s no news. They’re stealing the Internet from us and we must do something about it. What it used to be a fun, collaborative hacking space is now ruled by corporations and narcissistic billionaires. Proprietary centralized social networks have become a space for hate, discrimination and propaganda. The messages that you see are those that they want you to see. Your data is no longer yours. They have become a massive thought control machine. You read what they want you to read and, in the end, you will end up writing and doing what they want you to write and to do. It’s a matter of time and money, and they have both.

These corporate-driven social networks are deceiving. They make us fall into false assumptions in a distorted reality. This delusion hits both individuals and organizations. For instance, in GNU Solidario and GNU Health, we fight for Social Medicine and for the rights of human and non-human animals. When we want to share an event, to make a fundraising campaign or to denounce human or animal rights violations we want the message to reach out as many people as possible. We could think, why not share it with our followers on Twitter / X? Experience has it, corporate social networks have not really made a difference in the outcomes. They will promote or “shadow ban” the message depending on who wrote it. You can guess the results for those who fight against neoliberal capitalism.

Social pressure exists, and is not trivial to overcome. Many fear that leaving proprietary centralized social networks that have been using for years will result in losing the status and contacts they’ve built throughout the years. Again, it’s not really a big deal. And we have great news, there are decentralized, community-driven alternatives! Some of those alternatives are Mastodon, Friendica or Diaspora. Not only social networks, today there is an free software alternative to pretty much any proprietary solution (search engines, scientific programs, multimedia, office suites, databases, games…)

There is a correlation between Free Software, freedom and privacy. The more Free Software, the more freedom and privacy you enjoy. The contrary also applies: Proprietary software is inversely proportional to our freedom, both at individual and collective level. There is no transparency, no privacy, no control, no rights in proprietary applications, networks or clouds.

In the last decades, the tech giants have been busy in a campaign to dismantle the Free Software philosophy and community. The “open source” euphemism is one of them. Richard Stallman (creator of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation) has been warning us about the dangers of “Open Source”. Free societies are built with free software, not with open source. I know some members in the free software community use both terms interchangeably, but I am convinced using the “Free Software” terms not only delivers software, but also freedom to our society.

Internet is no longer fun or empathetic. It has become a hostile and toxic environment, the medium for corporations and elites that increase concentration of power, social gradient and create very unjust societies. They use our data to control individuals and governments. We certainly don’t want to be part of that.

It is our moral duty to bring back spirit of solidarity that RMS delivered in the late 80’s, and that made possible the GNU movement, the best operating systems, programming languages, web servers and database engines for everyone. The GNU project was the inspiration for projects like GNU Health, helping millions around the globe, delivering freedom and equity in healthcare.

In the end, it is up to us to embrace federated, community driven social networks and free software applications. Millions of individuals, activists, free software projects, NGOs and even the European Union have already joined the Fediverse and Mastodon. It only takes an initial push to break the social pressure to set ourselves and our societies free.

Citing our friends from GNUnet: “You broke the Internet… we’ll build a GNU one”.

Happy hacking!

Follow us in Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gnuhealth

Original post: https://my.gnusolidario.org/2024/09/26/time-to-take-back-the-internet/

Statuses updated and a keyboard

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 26 Sep 2024, Week 39

Community News

F-Droid Build Status was updated to 5.6.4 and no one will get this update. Why? Well, the app is now built reproducibly so if you have it installed you need to uninstall it and then reinstall it. (Yes, we wish this switch to be easier to perform, but the UI is not there yet)

Firefox 130 and 130.0.1 were released September 3rd and 17th with 15 security fixes, however Fennec and Mull builds will be delayed due to Google removing a necessary component from the NDK in revision 27, apparently to “save some storage space”. 😐

FlorisBoard was updated to 0.4.0 after a two year pause, if you’re the kind that looks a keyboard in the mouth, do peak at the extensive changelog.

Status: Crypto Wallet, Messenger, Ethereum Browser was updated to the newly designed 2.30.0 after an one and a half year hiatus. The feature list is too long, but the devs have a blog post that details everything. (App screenshots will be updated soon)

Removed Apps

3 apps were removed
  • ADW.Launcher: Home screen replacement (Just use KISS!)
  • ForceDoze: Enable Doze mode immediately after screen off and turn off motion sensing (The new fork was announced last week, EnforceDoze)
  • Loyalty Card Keychain: Manages barcode-based store/loyalty cards on your phone (Catima is working fine)

Newly Added Apps

7 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

123 more apps were updated

(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Is “Open Source” ever hyphenated?

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Is “Open Source” ever hyphenated?
“Open source” (no hyphen) is a lexicalized compound noun which is no longer transparent with respect to its meaning (i.e., open source is not just about being source-viewable, but also about defining user freedoms) which can then be further compounded (with for example “open source license”)

Eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities at the source

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The push towards memory safe programming languages is strong, and for good reason. However, especially for bigger projects with a lot of code that potentially needs to be rewritten or replaced, you might question if all the effort is even worth it, particularly if all the main contributors would also need to be retrained. Well, it turns out that merely just focusing on writing new code in a memory safe language will drastically reduce the number of memory safety issues in a project as a whole. Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a pervasive threat to software security. At Google, we believe the path to eliminating this class of vulnerabilities at scale and building high-assurance software lies in Safe Coding, a secure-by-design approach that prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages. This post demonstrates why focusing on Safe Coding for new code quickly and counterintuitively reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, finally breaking through the stubbornly high plateau of memory safety vulnerabilities and starting an exponential decline, all while being scalable and cost-effective. ↫ Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert at the Google Security Blog In this blog post, Google highlights that even if you only write new code in a memory-safe language, while only applying bug fixes to old code, the number of memory safety issues will decreases rapidly, even when the total amount of code written in unsafe languages increases. This is because vulnerabilities decay exponentially – in other words, the older the code, the fewer vulnerabilities it’ll have. In Android, for instance, using this approach, the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years, which is a great result and something quite tangible. Despite the majority of code still being unsafe (but, crucially, getting progressively older), we’re seeing a large and continued decline in memory safety vulnerabilities. The results align with what we simulated above, and are even better, potentially as a result of our parallel efforts to improve the safety of our memory unsafe code. We first reported this decline in 2022, and we continue to see the total number of memory safety vulnerabilities dropping. ↫ Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert at the Google Security Blog What this shows is that a large project, like, say, the Linux kernel, for no particular reason whatsoever, doesn’t need to replace all of its code with, say, Rust, again, for no particular reason whatsoever, to reap the benefits of a modern, memory-safe language. Even by focusing on memory-safe languages only for new code, you will still exponentially reduce the number of memory safety vulnerabilities. This is not a new discovery, as it’s something observed and confirmed many times before, and it makes intuitive sense, too; older code has had more time to mature.

Mega WoW 3.3.5a Fun Server Start 1 max 255

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Video by via Dailymotion Source MegaWow Server Features: Starting Level: Players start at level 1 with equipped gear and level up to 255.Tier System: Experience 13 tiers of progression, excluding starter gear and leveling.Donor Gear: Obtain special gear available for donors.Buff System: Enjoy various buffs to enhance your gameplay experience.Raids: Engage in challenging raid encounters.Dungeons: … Read more

Duda Lima recorre após justiça negar medida protetiva

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Video by via Dailymotion Source A Justiça de São Paulo não concedeu a Duda Lima uma medida protetiva solicitada contra Nahuel Medina. O marqueteiro de Ricardo Nunes (MDB), prefeito de São Paulo e candidato à reeleição, recorreu da decisão. Assista ao Jornal da Manhã completo: https://youtube.com/live/y24F0oI-2xs Baixe o app Panflix: https://www.panflix.com.br/ Inscreva-se no nosso canal:https://www.youtube.com/c/jovempannews … Read more

PowToon Tutorial 2024

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Video by via Dailymotion Source Original Video: HOW TO USE POWTOON ｜｜ MAKE YOUR OWN ANIMATION [2LroQgbdiX4]Creator: RSource: YouTubeLicense: Creative Commons Attribution License (reuse allowed) Go to Source